Technical SEO Consultant

Technical SEO Consultant — Advisory, Coaching & Knowledge Transfer About us We're an established Australian audio-visual integration business (27 years, around 15 staff), working mainly with private and Catholic secondary schools — classroom and commercial AV systems, plus a service department. Our website has historically produced a steady trickle of qualified enquiries. It's not our only channel and doesn't need to be huge, but it's currently performing well below its own past baseline and we want it recovered and put on a stable footing. The situation In mid-2025 our website was rebuilt during a rushed staff handover. Site structure changed, a lot of established content wasn't carried across, and organic visibility fell sharply — ranking keywords dropped from roughly 1,080 to around 155, and enquiries fell from 1–2 a week to about one every 2–3 weeks. Since then our team has done substantial in-house recovery work: Mapped several hundred old high-traffic URLs from historical analytics data and set up redirects to their new equivalents. Recovered and republished a large body of old content, and written new educational content aimed at both search and AI tools. Adopted SEMrush for tracking. It has helped but not restored performance. We know the redirect mapping is likely incomplete (some old URLs were never re-pointed, and some were redirected to only loosely-related pages), some recovered posts have degraded elements such as broken images, and our visibility is now almost entirely branded — we have little presence on the non-branded AV search terms that represent the real growth opportunity. Our marketing lead is genuinely strong on content and strategy. The specific gap we're filling is specialist technical SEO, plus a clear prioritised plan. What we're looking for An experienced technical SEO consultant to work alongside our marketing lead — validate what's been done, find what's still broken, prioritise the highest-impact fixes, and coach us so the ongoing work lives in-house. This is explicitly collaborative and teaching-oriented, not a hands-off managed retainer. We want to build internal capability, not dependency. We work in phases and want to start with Phase 1: the smallest set of actions that recovers the most ground fastest, get into a steady weekly rhythm on it, then move to later phases. Please propose what Phase 1 should be. How we'd work together An initial audit and diagnosis that validates or challenges our own read of the post-migration damage and our redirect/recovery work. Intensive working sessions (including multi-hour screenshares where useful) through SEMrush, Search Console and GA4 together, so we understand the why. You set prioritised tasks; our team executes through the week; we review together the following session. Our marketing lead has roughly two days a week (~16 hours) to put into execution, and a large share of that is content — she writes strong educational content and will own it. We want the technical strategy to direct and get maximum value from that content effort. You help us set up the dashboards we should watch weekly. Scope Technical health audit (crawlability, indexation, redirects, site structure and information architecture, internal linking, Core Web Vitals, structured data, metadata); verification of our redirect map and identification of unre-pointed or soft-404 redirects; a phased, impact-ranked action plan; content architecture and a non-branded keyword strategy to grow beyond branded search; and guidance on AI-search / GEO visibility, which is currently very low for us. We'd also value your honest view on manual link-building / digital PR — we understand it's labour-intensive and can't simply be handed off. Engagement & rate Fractional and flexible: an initial audit block, then ongoing sessions of a few hours per week or fortnight, adjusted to need. We're happy to pay a strong hourly rate for real expertise and low hours; offshore or hybrid is fine. Preferred structure: fixed price for the initial audit, hourly for ongoing advisory — tell us if you'd propose otherwise. Please include in your proposal Your recommended approach and how you'd phase it. What the initial audit covers, its fixed price, and turnaround. Your ongoing hourly rate and a realistic hours estimate for the first 8–12 weeks. Any assumptions or exclusions. Experience & case studies Please include relevant examples or case studies, especially any post-migration SEO recovery work. We also want to see experience across WordPress, Google Search Console and GA4, SEMrush or Ahrefs, information architecture, Core Web Vitals, structured data, B2B or niche-industry SEO, and AI-search optimisation. Links to work or references we can speak to directly are welcome.